by Amanda Fellows
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I wake up when the drekking alarm goes off - the worst thing I ever had done to me - worse even than that faulty junk that crooked doc sewed into my skull that once. Never, I tell you, never fall for having one of those internal alarms put into your head. For weeks I picked up the clock off the bedside table and threw it against the wall, and all it got me was a slotted clock. Even though the fragging thing was supposed to be indestructable. That’s what it said on the label but in small letters so that the lobs can’t read it. And, of course, the alarm didn’t stop when the clock broke, so I didn’t even get no drekking satisfaction. Anyway, I’m cursing before I’ve even opened my eyes,thanks to that drekking alarm, and then my eyes open and I start to wonder what’s wrong, because, you see, it’s still dark. Even then I don’t cotton, instead I start thinking that the alarm’s running wrong, that there’s some malfunction - for lob’s sake, it wouldn’t be the first time. But then finally it sinks into my over-abused brain, finally the right brain cell knocks against some wire, and I realise that it’s not the drekking wake-up alarm at all, but the security alarm. Now I haven’t ever heard the security alarm before, ‘cause I only had the drekking system glued in a few weeks ago. Anyway, when it connects that the security alarm is buzzing, I start cursing faster. Of course not aloud. I was cursing aloud before, but now I stop. I get out of bed, as quiet as I can, because somewhere in all that oh-so-darkness of my two-bit apartment, I know some wired-out hi-rise bastard with a silenced pistol or some stealth-mod lob with claw-knives glued in his hands is just hanging out there in the shadows waiting for me to make a move. Oh yeah, and he can probably see in the dark too, and now I curse myself for not having the low-light put into my pretty screened-up cyber-eyes. I never did, because I like the darkness too much. My apartment is real dark. I got one on the inside of the building so it doesn’t have any windows. And now I got a choice, I figure, standing real quiet in the darkness, naked, a peal of fear trembling like thunder all down my spine. Now I got the choice of staying in the dark and hoping he can’t see me, or going for the lights and assuming that he can anyhow. I stand there, gripped with fragging indecision, and then all my fear bursts out all over me like a hot virus and I lunge for the light switch. My hand nearly doesn’t stop in time - nearly goes through the wall. The warm yellow light floods the room, and my eyes dart frantically everywhere - the soft thick black carpet, the dark grey walls, the almost mod leather-look chairs, the vid-unit. It’s all still there and its all okay. I check it all - the bathroom, the kitchen - but there’s no-one there, and just then I realise the alarm stopped, some time ago - I’m not sure when, and it must have all been a false alarm. I grin with the sheer relief of it all and check the door lock just to be sure, and it’s all still locked, and it’s all still quiet. I’ve got a headache so I pop some tabs and I go back to bed. Did you ever dream like that? The fragging alarm woke me up just then, blaring through my quiet mind like some drekking klaxxon. And then it’s time for work because I never leave any time for breakfast - just time enough to get dressed and to catch the line down at the local tube station, which is only a block away, and then to stand there swaying gently for the ten minutes, nineteen seconds it takes to get me to work. Yessir, ten minutes too long, that’s what I say. One of these days I’m going to buy one of those corp-look Ford cars with all mirrored windows, even the windscreen, and then I won’t going to have to stand next to every specimen of metahumanity who happens to ride on my line. I see the same ones every day - there’s this real cultured looking lo-brain who wears this perfectly pressed suit and carries a slim black briefcase chained to his wrist. Always wondered what he kept hidden in there. There’s a couple of hi-rise secretaries that have never even looked back at me, because they might dirty their pretty little almond shaped eyes. They think that the world spins around their taut little techno backsides. Then there’s Wart-Face, this lob - face like a squashed soykaf carton left out too long. You know, the way they grow those tufts of green and orange mold when they get wet? Yeah - there’s all kinds, but they all smell the same, the drekking lobs - they don’t smell human they just smell kinda wrong. Today I’ve got my eyes set to black - just black, with the faintest swirling pattern of deepest midnight blue. No real reason - it just suits my mood. When I feel really fragged off with everyone I like to turn on my “gouged out” look. It really works, when you don’t look too close - looks just like someone gouged my real eyes out. Of course they did, in all reality, but hey, I paid for it didn’t I? Then I get to work, and work and I are as two-finger as me and anything else in my life. Hey, it pays me. And I get respect at work because I’m fragging good at what I do. Work puts nice food in my fridge and nice clothes on my back so I don’t frag off about work a real lot. I clip my pass on my pocket, and saunter straight past Charlie, the lo-brain doorman. Charlie knows me, so he just nods and says good morning. He’s a nice guy Charlie - always likes a chat. Today he’s memorised some line about last nights Cyberslam™ trial between the Ratboys and the Shocktroops. Not real bright, Charlie. He’s a nice guy but he still smells like a lob. And then I’m riding the lift to my little office cubicle up on the seventeenth floor, and when I get there, it’s piled high with files as usual and half of them stamped Urgent or Confidential in red ink like that’s going to make me pay more attention to them. But what catches my eye this morning is the big sealed metal cannister that’s parked right in the middle of my desk. “Hey,” I say, “Hey, who left their lunch here?” and Wozzo, who has the cubicle not right opposite me, but the one behind that, says: “The Boss left that for you. Said you was to take care of it right away.” And he’s looking over the partitions at me and the cannister in this real curious way that makes me want to rip it open right now, like some kid at Christmas time, but I don’t because Wozzo’s watching me and it wouldn’t be cool. “Yeah,” I say, “That’s what it says here on the box - Urgent, Confidential - therefore Lunch, QED?” And Wozzo ignores me for being such a whacked out smartarse, and disappears back into his hole, which is just what I had in mind. I look closer at the cannister and my eye is caught by the signature on the transferral label, and my eyes widen, because Wozzo is right this time - the Boss’s signature is there. Now when I say the Boss, I don’t mean the guy who tells me what to do - no, him and I are on a first name basis. When I say the Boss, I mean that dark and distant hi-rise who sits up there in the glassed-out office up on 23rd. You only see him one day out of ten and even then you never seem to notice him until he’s gone. No, I’d never had any jobs straight from the Boss before, and I guess it was that moment that I should have started to look out for trouble. So I let a streak of bilious green come into my eyes, shooting through them like some radioactive waste-product swirling out at sea, and start to open the cannister. It’s full of documents and recordings. Vid, sound, everything - a whole packet load of stuff about nothing I’d ever heard of before. It takes me all morning just to sort through it all and to realise just what the drek it is about. It’s about some girl - a pretty soft-faced, soft-bodied mid-land chick, about seventeen, with the kind of body that reminds you of a teddy-bear, and big bright doughy eyes that just beg to be separated by a bullet-hole. Don’t get me wrong - I don’t hold no drek with the bastards that go around doing that kind of thing, but in my line of work you get to know the look of people who just walk through life with “Victim” written on their foreheads in that invisible crayon that only the people with the highly-mod eyes can see. From all the crap that’s on my desk, and even more from the signature on the directive that came with it, seems like she’s real important to someone, so I don't dare just shovel the whole lot into the waste-paper basket like I might with some other hopeless case like this. Instead I start putting the facts together. She’s gone missing - Drek No! You just had to look at that fuzzy little picture to know that! Half these soft little girls get put into someone’s doll collection, and the other half just turn up on the streets with more cyberwear glued into their BTL-hooked brains than in those of the lobs they sleep with. And when you pick them up out of the gutter to take them home to their mid-land happy-corp families, they scream and yell and pop their razors and call their boyfriends, and I’ll be slotted if those street-faced teddy-bear girls don’t stink just like lobs stink from living with lobs the way they do. She disappeared coming home from school one day, and her friends say she’s been talking to this leather-look hi-rise lately - goes by the name of Zader. Now when I hear the name Zader, I get this kind of shrivelling sensation in my guts, because when I stand in the dark thinking of cybered-out hi-rise bastards with auto-aim gun links and rad-mod eyes, this image of Zader is what comes straight into my head. It seems that every second month a case comes up and Zader is the main event. Yeah, Zader and I never hit it off real well - this scar on my shoulder is one of his, and this patch on my left cheek is where they pasted the skin over the place where he signed his name in laser. My head still doesn’t look quite right, but I’m glad I didn’t really need the particular part of my brain that the bullet ripped out, and even luckier that I’d just upgraded my dock-wagon contract. If I could stretch someone’s guts over the furnace and get to watch their still-conscious face, you could say that that someone would be Zader. But something about this case does not ring true, because although Zader is one arrogant jandering hi-rise bastard, he’s not stupid enough to give his name to some kid he’s hunting. About then I get real ultra-wary, and ring down to book out some of that nice thick security armour that goes quite smooth under a trench-coat, and a Gun, and a Big Gun, and a Really Big Gun. And I wish that I could afford some highqual wires, because there goes my hand knocking my coffee cup off the desk before I can stop it, and when I curse Wozzo peers over the partitions and grins sunnily at me while sadly shaking his head. Now usually it wears off after a while, but today it just gets worse, though I try those stretching exercises and I even take my medication. Yeah, I’m starting to think that I’m getting beyond all this drek. The vid is some security-cam recording from the school, and there’s the teddy-bear girl talking to some leathery hi-rise git, and he does look a lot like Zader, except it’s nearly impossible to tell from this picture, and I spend some time trying to enhance the shot to get a better look at him but the quality is really fragged. Hell, considering, it looks a lot like Zader. And the audio is a ‘phone line connection with a ransom request - the typical bag-of-money demand that any two-bit runner-wanna could dream up. I compare the audio to a recording of Zader’s voice taken from some other case, and the match is 96.5. Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean that this creep on the line is Zader - it could be a rip-off job - program his voice into some gadget and speak through it so that you sound like him. That can be done, and I’m just not convinced, so I go over all the details of the case, again and again, and I stare at it all until I have this really drekking headache, and I scarcely even notice when Wozzo says: “Hey, it’s time to go home - aren’t you coming?” I ignore him and keep on working - later, later, like I always do on the first day of a really important case, until I realise it’s really late - about one in the morning - and there’s no-one here except the security guard come to check on me to see if I’m still alive. So I get up to go home because I’m not thinking straight any more, but as I get up I notice this thing on the edge of the reception counter near the lift, and I pick it up because it looks out of place. I stare at it and its a little boxed electronic kit, a nice quality one containing one of those little laser torches that fit into the palm of your hand and a whole bunch of little electronic tools. I look at it and shrug and put it back on the counter, and then I wander out into the lift and push the button. Except that my hand overreacts again like it has been all afternoon, and it jerks up out of control and hits the button for floor 23. Even then I’m not really worried, but I’m thinking that I have got to get to my cyberdoc and get her to straighten things out, because something must be wrong with my wires for this to be happening. Then I start thinking maybe something must be wrong with me, and I’m starting to feel uncomfortable and nervous that maybe she won’t be able to glue all those wires back together again this time. So I reach out to hit the cancel button and send me down to the ground floor, and as I look down at my arm reaching out to push the button I see that under my trenchcoat I’ve got on the security armour that I requisitioned earlier today, and cold trickling sweat suddenly chills down my back, because I can’t remember putting it on. The sweat gets really icy when I see the Really Big Gun cradled under my other arm. Drek! Drek! Drek! And my hand has stopped half-way to the Cancel button, and changed direction and my fingers close over the fuse panel next to the controls and rip it open. Now, the alarms should have gone off about then, but they don’t, and while I’m wondering why, my hands are taking out the little electronics kit from my trenchcoat pocket. I’m picking out the little tools and my hands doing things with the wires and circuits behind the panel. I’m no electronics expert and I’m not sure what they’re doing, but I’m still moving upwards, upwards, and part of me is praying - which surprises me, because I didn’t know I still knew how to pray - that the security override preventing access to floor 23 is still in place and that the door of the lift won’t open, no matter what my hands do inside this panel. Two wires accidentally touch inside of the console, and my fingers get slightly fried. I curse out loud again but just then we get to floor 23 and the lift stops moving. My fingers move deftly, making two or three small adjustments and then the door silently glides open. I’m not getting out of the drekking lift I think, and I open my mouth to call to the security guard that I know must be standing a few metres away, but even as I do my gun jerks upwards and my finger pulls the trigger, and as the bullets bite through his face all that comes out of my mouth is this inarticulate gurgle. I move forward through the corridors of level 23, and although I have never been there before, I turn left then right, and decisively pick my way from each piece of cover to the next. All the while I watch the way my hands ready the gun to shoot, and even though I don’t know that there’s a guard around that corner, and another around that one, my hands seem to, and the bullets crash into this man I’ve seen nearly every working day of my life for the past six years, and take down the young security guy I sometimes talk to over coffee in the cafeteria. He’s a nice guy, even though he’s a hi-rise git. He asked me to his wedding when he got married five weeks ago, but I didn’t show because there would be too many hi-risers there. Now he’s dead on the floor, and my feet step carefully over his riddled body. Then I’m in command central, outside the big door that guards the data storage banks - the separate ones that aren’t hooked up to the main net to try and discourage data-theft. All the most important files are accessible through those sleek stream-lined babies in there, and no-one I’ve ever spoken to has been inside that little room. And my hands are doing something with wires and gadgets and equipment I didn’t even know I was carrying, and soon - too soon - the door slides back and there are the terminals. Then I walk over to the computer. I take out the laser torch, turn it on, and bring it steadily up towards my head, just behind the ear, looking into the reflective screen to guide my actions. Oh drek, oh drek, I’m going to die! The thought wrenches across my mind and I somehow drag the hand holding the torch away from my head. Bad mistake. The beam sweeps down my face, cutting through my skin, into my skull and taking a piece out of my left eye. I cry out with the pain, while my hand calmly goes back up to my head and cuts a slice of skin off. Meanwhile, my eye is making some nasty cracking sounds and is sparking crazily, and I’m starting to feel dizzy and unsteady on my feet. There is blood running all down my face and soaking into the front of my shirt, but there’s surprisingly little coming from the neat wound behind my ear even though a fair slice of skin has been taken off there. My hands plug a connection into the datajack I didn’t know I had, and plug the other end into the terminal in front of me. And then I stand there for a while, unable to move, and just staring at the screen in front of me. I can’t say anything. I can’t do anything. I can’t move. After four, five, six minutes, I unplug the connector and then the alarms suddenly start firing off. I bolt for the lifts, and make it there without seeing anyone from security. Why did the alarms take so long to fire up? I travel back down to my office where I plug into my own terminal. There is a period of waiting just like before only shorter, and then my hands slowly unplug myself and put the connector away. Then, as I hear the security guards coming up the corridor, my hands travel down and rummage around in my trenchcoat pockets. They find the laser-torch and turn it on, bringing it smoothly up to my face. My eye is still sparking, and the other one isn’t seeing too well. The images are doubled or trebled and swim in and out of focus. The torch hovers in front of my face, and I imagine that any moment it is going to plunge down and cut my head in half. The guards are at the door, shouting out a warning, calling for me to throw down the gun, throw down the torch, or they will mow me down where I stand. The torch hesitates a moment, as my fingers change the setting, and then it cuts into my face. I scream and scream as the torch lightly burns the word “Victim” across my forehead in sloppy loose-handed script.
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